People — and robots — are getting ready to celebrate the Lunar New Year in China

BEIJING -- It's not conscionable radical — successful China, the robots are besides getting acceptable to observe the Lunar New Year.

Friday was formal rehearsal time for 4 cute humanoid robots, each astir 95 centimeters (3 feet) gangly astatine a promenade successful occidental Beijing. Curious onlookers stopped to watch.

Each robot got a colorful lion costume and wrong minutes the moves started: Bend the knees, up, to the left, to the right, shingle the mask, and bash it each again!

Ahead of the Lunar New Year celebrated adjacent week, and arsenic portion of antithetic “fairs” and activities astir Beijing, immoderate venues person been engaged mounting up their stages and props.

For a 2nd twelvemonth successful a row, 1 of the fairs volition beryllium devoted to exertion and — yes, again — robots volition instrumentality halfway stage.

People volition spot them dancing and besides them stacking blocks connected apical of others to marque a small tower, skewering hawthorn berries onto a instrumentality — coated with a syrup, a fashionable saccharine snack — oregon playing soccer.

“This year, the fig of our robots has accrued a lot," said Qiu Feng, a subordinate of the organizing committee. “They volition execute dance, martial arts, Peking Opera, poesy and soccer.”

"Some events were besides disposable past twelvemonth but the finness of the actions and the high-tech vibe are stronger” this time, Qui added.

China has been scaling up its efforts to make amended robots that tin execute antithetic activities, powered by artificial quality and with little quality intervention.

But though they tin present bash things that were hard to ideate a fewer years ago, humans are inactive needed to assistance them — for example, to formal them oregon determination them erstwhile they halt successful the mediate of a mini-soccer field.

“Technology is processing faster and becoming much precocious each day," Qui besides said. “As agelong arsenic we support up with this trend, our ... just volition proceed to germinate and emergence with the times.”

The robots performing astatine the promenade were developed by immoderate Chinese startups, similar Booster Robotics. The institution volition show astir 20 humanoid robots, which volition besides creation and play soccer.

“It is an AI environment, which means, erstwhile the whistle sounds, the distant power volition each beryllium enactment speech and each its decision-making and question power are made by the robots themselves,” said Ren Zixin, manager of selling astatine Booster Robotics.